Quick question. Why can’t you live your life by the teachings of Jesus and leave out the rest of the absurdity?
Kevin,
Let me be the first to tell you on this day of thanks to shut up.
Kevin, don’t let the wingnuts get you down, Thanksgiving is a secular holiday. 
“Thanksgiving Day is a harvest festival. Traditionally, it is a time to give thanks for the harvest and express gratitude in general. It is primarily a North American holiday which has generally become a national secular holiday with religious origins.”
I didn’t make the first post today. Just a quick response. Tell your fellow flock of sheep to shut up. Your hypocrisy once again shines as bright as the sun. Happy Thanksgiving!!
We Sheep do! But the goats won’t let us live in peace.
It is nice to know that some of our fine Pagan traditions have survived the onslaught of upstart religions :mrgreen::mrgreen::mrgreen:
OK later I gotta go dance naked around a stone circle
Gerry
Interesting excerpt for Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith” on religious moderates:
The only reason anyone is “moderate” in matters of faith these
days is that he has assimilated some of the fruits of the last two
thousand years of human thought (democratic politics,6 scientific
advancement on every front, concern for human rights, an end to
cultural and geographic isolation, etc). The doors leading out of
scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we
see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has
evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of
modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt. Not the
least among these developments has been the emergence of our tendency
to value evidence and to be convinced by a proposition to the
degree that there is evidence for it. Even most fundamentalists live
by the lights of reason in this regard; it is just that their minds seem
to have been partitioned to accommodate the profligate truth claims
of their faith. Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on
him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely
to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only
to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his
bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire
for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the
universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.
Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least
educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters
than anyone did two thousand years ago—and much of this knowledge
is incompatible with scripture. Having heard something about
the medical discoveries of the last hundred years, most of us no
longer equate disease processes with sin or demonic possession.
Having learned about the known distances between objects in our
universe, most of us (about half of us, actually) find the idea that the
whole works was created six thousand years ago (with light from
distant stars already in transit toward the earth) impossible to take
seriously. Such concessions to modernity do not in the least suggest
that faith is compatible with reason, or that our religious traditions
are in principle open to new learning: it is just that the utility of
ignoring (or “reinterpreting”) certain articles of faith is now overwhelming.
Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass
surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few
things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since
the time of Moses.
So it is not that these texts have maintained their integrity over
time (they haven’t); it is just that they have been effectively edited
by our neglect of certain of their passages. Most of what remains—
the “good parts”—has been spared the same winnowing because we
do not yet have a truly modern understanding of our ethical intuitions
and our capacity for spiritual experience. If we better understood
the workings of the human brain, we would undoubtedly
discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness, our
modes of conduct, and the various ways we use our attention. What
makes one person happier than another? Why is love more conducive
to happiness than hate? Why do we generally prefer beauty
to ugliness and order to chaos? Why does it feel so good to smile and
laugh, and why do these shared experiences generally bring people
closer together? Is the ego an illusion, and, if so, what implications
does this have for human life? Is there life after death? These are
ultimately questions for a mature science of the mind. If we ever
develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more
useful to mystics than they now are to astronomers.
While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to
stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about
the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and
religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by
the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a
failed fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in
hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious
moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything
very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that
fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their
freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in
religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally
unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don’t
like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture
imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species
of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of
all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with
God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and
scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to
put it on a par with fundamentalism. The texts themselves are
unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious
moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness
to fully submit to God’s law. By failing to live by the letter of the
texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious
moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas
of faith are called into question—i.e., that we know there is a God,
and that we know what he wants from us—religious moderation
will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.
The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that
religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage
of hope and ignorance, nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible
price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings
with other human beings. Religious moderation, insofar as it represents
an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox
religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality,
ethics, and the building of strong communities. Religious moderates
seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and
innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy.
Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality
to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even
spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standards
of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise
maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from
men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic
ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience
to tradition acceptable? Medicine? Engineering? Not even
politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking
about ethical values and spiritual experience.
Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the
fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus,
except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy,
and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more
or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be
considered a fool to think that the earth is the center of the cosmos, or
that trepanning* constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious
ideas would still be beyond reproach. There are two explanations for
this: either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a
millennium ago—while our knowledge on all other fronts was still
hopelessly inchoate—or religion, being the mere maintenance of
dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. We
will see that there is much to recommend the latter view.
With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more
and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a
genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it
should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more
useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would
have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of
past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now, and
describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of
what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire project
of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot survive the changes
that have come over us—culturally, technologically, and even ethically.
Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will survive
it.
Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but
they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what
we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical
said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers,
because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly
and truthfully about the state of our world—to say, for instance, that
the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying
gibberish—is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive
it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political
correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to
maintain the iconography of our ignorance.
It is so funny and pitiful to watch atheist, try so hard to eliminate the God they claim does not exist. BTW thanks for talking about God so much, it saves us a lot of time, on the introduction! :mrgreen:
I am going to ask a very important question
Would you move into a home for life with out even seeing it?
As a home inspector we inspect but many want to go live forever in a place that they were told about in the Bible
Maybe we should start working our clients like the religious leaders have worked man kind for years - By FAITH
How much faster would man kind have progressed in solving the issues of life if he had more faith in logic
Remember most all start with faith in God as little children - what goes wrong??
And lets get off the public part of the message Board
Too bad someone can’t get some of these threads moved to the proper sections
Some of us want to respond but NOT here - And so I do not pratice what I preach
rlb
Question for you. Would you move into a house that was built on Sand and sold to you by a crooked agent, that cost more than you have made in your whole short life here?
Have you even looked in the members only “not for everyone” section? You’ve had ample chances to throw in your thoughts. Go look for the “Nationalized Healthcare” thread and put your two cents in.
Question for you. Would you move into a house that was built on Sand and sold to you by a crooked agent, that cost more than you have made in your whole short life here
Ken
I love you too – If you are a drinking man I will buy – if not dinner is on me at the next Nachi convention that we both go to
You have just drawn a picture of many of the homes here in Florida
They are built on sand
Many of the Agents are crooked
The cost is more than people make in their life
They are able to stand some of the worst of storms on this sand
The crooked agents are checked by smart buyers
The cost is never payed because people move to a different home as their needs change
I was on the phone to my son when I read your post and we both could not stop laphing. The only thing that you left out is why do old people live in Florida in the summer? They know that the end of life is near and they know where they are going when they die. They are just trying to get use to the heat
I do with that more people would not take life so personal. It is realy a lot of fun
rlb
It really isn’t hard. It’s quite easy to understand why the whole fairytale is false. It’s just entertaining to watch you squirm without any logical, rational rebuttal. It is entertaining to watch you but I have to say it’s more interesting to watch more rational people like Mark and Michael because they do “try so hard” to make sense of it all. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be to have to accept the absurd claims in order to accept the respectable claims of the Bible. It would drive me nuts!
**
It would be a short trip! You have never seen me squirm, boy! I have taken meaner Bowel Movements than you. I am starting to pity you more though, one minute, you say it is a Fairytale, the next, you claim to be an agnostic! BTW, I have no idea where you stole your ego from, but you really should take it back you are making joey look smart! :roll:
Would you mind enlightening us on your definition of agnostic?
I would be glad to drink a beer with you Richard, hope we meet someday. MC
It is not my definition that is in question here!